zipkin-api-example VS community

Yes, I really agree, and I've gone through the same pain, but try using the alternatives that claim to be better because they have OpenAPI specifications [1]

The example shows you how to use the swagger tool, parse the OpenAPI spec [2], auto-generate GoLang glue code, call __one__ of those auto-generated functions and log a trace.

However, there is zero documentation, zero other examples, and I'm left scratching my head whether there's even one person in the world using this approach. I eventually ended up just directly using the service APIs [3] via REST calls.

OTEL is painful, but the alternatives are no better :( I really wish there's some interest in this space, since SLO's and SLI measurements are becoming increasingly important.

[1] https://github.com/openzipkin/zipkin-api-example

[2] https://github.com/openzipkin/zipkin-api/blob/master/zipkin2...

[3] https://zipkin.io/zipkin-api/#/

otel is working on their events spec https://github.com/open-telemetry/community/issues/1688

1. Agreed. It's the sink and the house attached to it, and the docs are thin and confusing as a result.

2. I had a similar experience to you. I wanted to implement a simple heartbeat in our app to get an idea of usage numbers. This is surprisingly not possible, which greatly confuses me given the name of the project. The low engagement on my question put me off and I abandoned my OpenTelemetry planning completely. [1][2]

[1] https://github.com/open-telemetry/community/discussions/1598

One of the OpenTelemetry Project's many Special Interest Groups (SIG) is the OpenTelemetry Community Demo SIG which gives support to a set of instrumented backend microservices and a web frontend app that are primarily used to showcase how to instrument a distributed system using OpenTelemetry. The application's main focus is to demonstrate the implementation process to instrument an application no matter what programming language, platform, or operating system your team is using, as well as providing different approaching techniques (automatic and manual instrumentation, metrics, baggage). All of this while following the standards and conventions defined by the official OpenTelemetry Documentation. More about the specific requirements can be found here. At Tracetest, we have always focused on becoming part of and embracing the OpenTelemetry community. One of our goals this summer was to get more involved with a core OpenTelemetry project where we could provide a meaningful contribution. The OTel demo became the best match for achieving that goal as it would not only help the community, but we at Tracetest needed a good example to test and showcase what can be done with our tool. During the version 0.7 project cycle, we created two specific tickets to get us closer to the community and start looking for things to pick up: